Mark Nowotarski

Authored Comments

Joe,

You are welcome. Wikipedia is the one I'm most familiar with. If you do decide to experiment, let me know. I'd like to sit in.

mark.nowotarski@gmail.com

<em>When is that last time you heard of an open source community actually censuring one of its own for poor behavior?</em>

Wikipedia has developed a rather strict code of behavior which can involve suspension or banning of editors who act in a destructive or malicious way.

<em>A third issue that arises in any truly collaborative environment is the issue of group think.</em>

Wikipedia provides a fertile ground for testing this. The community has an ideal of the “neutral point of view” (NPOV), but none the less, relatively small cadres of motivated editors tend to enforce certain points of view for certain individual articles. As an experiment, for example, take an article on a relatively highly charged issue and try to introduce an edit that is counter to the prevailing point of view. I personally found this to be an excellent learning exercise on how to make effective edits.